Tag Archives: Search engine optimization

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While many businesses are using SEO services to get their name out there, they are only optimizing their business potential partially. Search done on your mobile device will often be done as a local search since that is what most users want. Local SEO services are an important way to make sure that locals are finding your website and your business when they do an online search. Continue reading →

A major part of inbound marketing to your website is obtaining backlinks that point towards your site by active link building. There are thousands of places on the internet that will tell you how to build links, but it’s ultimately up to you to decide how you’ll go about gaining backlinks in order to drive natural traffic to your site, but also to improve your search rankings. Continue reading →

The dead backlinking method is probably news to quite a lot of people, and indeed I have only just come across it. This is why I would like to share it with you all. The method itself has been around since the beginning of the Internet. I would like to share this with you as in a way it is a form of guest posting but a great deal easier. Continue reading →

The days when law firms and agencies in similar niches could advertise exclusively via posters in the bus stop or the Sunday newspapers are long gone. Nowadays, lawyers require a lot more publicity to keep ahead of the competition and land those hefty contracts than they ever did before.

This is why the legal firm’s online presence is crucial for its survival and profitability. However, you cannot simply upload a half-baked website that includes minimalistic information and contact details and expect the traffic and prospects to start pouring in. Let’s examine the most important steps in SEO for legal agencies. Continue reading →

Almost anyone who owns a website is familiar with the term Google PageRank. This is a patented measure of a Web page which according to the Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, measures the authority of any given Web page. This measure is one of many elements in the Google search algorithm and many believe it to be perhaps the most important. Continue reading →

The big scare in the latest months has been whether or not negative SEO exists, and if it is possible to negatively impact another webmasters website. The truth is, negative SEO has existed for quite some time, it’s definitely possible to penalize another site on the Internet. Could someone target your website? Continue reading →

Often in the search engine optimization (SEO) world, people assume we should have an abiding hatred of pay per click (PPC) advertisements, twirling our moustaches and plotting its inevitable downfall. However, this isn’t at all true. Continue reading →

In any search engine optimization (SEO) guide, they will tell you to do keyword research, using Google Adwords. Most guides won’t give you any more detail than that. “Just type in your keywords and Adwords will give you keywords,” or something to that extent, is the general gist. In actuality, keyword research is much more complicated and requires a complete understanding of the function of your site as well as your potential readership. There are a variety of steps that go into keyword research.

Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London, England is an amusing place to visit if you like to hear empassioned debaters. They often take up extreme positions so as to attract the crowd. Ideally if a few hecklers join in with counter-positions, it all adds to the fun.

You might imagine that Speakers’ Forum was not a suitable place to discuss how best to make websites perform well on the Internet. You would be right except that the online debate often resembles that Hyde Park scene.

That image came to mind in a recent post by Jill Whalen that talked about A Fatal Flaw In SEO. Those are dramatic words and you might wonder what would elicit such a headline. It turns out that Jill was incensed by a post by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. This had included in the title equally inflammatory language with the words, Terrible SEO Advice.

Jill said that Rand’s advice could

… potentially set SEO back at least at decade, in my opinion.

In the article, he apologized to his audience of budding SEOs for having ever told them to do what’s right for their users. In fact, he called putting your users first, “utterly false and tragically misleading.”

If you listen to this advice, your SEO will be fatally flawed from the get-go.

This is certainly soap-box rhetoric. Both have taken extreme positions. After all that’s what attracts the crowds, … and the comments, … and the backlinks, which is what SEO is all about, at least with Google.

Whichever you would label Black or White, neither is correct. The truth as usual is a shade of grey. You need a balance and should be considering both Users and the Search Engines at the same time. It’s probably 70% Jill’s advice and 30% Rand’s advice. The problem is that such a shade of grey will probably not stand out against the simple Blacks and Whites.

Equally if the best advice is somewhat more complex, some will opt for a simple approach that is supported by one of the luminaries of the SEO world. After all, that is what a Google search may indicate is the most relevant advice. The only saving grace here is that hopefully these contradictory positions will make some people realize that the true answer may lie somewhere in the middle.

Link building is generally a term used around the SEO industry to describe building relevant links to a website in an effort to rank that site for specific terms while also building trust, value and equity to that website. All too often however, link building is associated with questionable SEO practices such as link buying or link spamming. As an old school online marketer and PR guy, I tend to take a different approach to my link building philosophy, and see link building as more of a branding and web presence approach.

That’s sound advice and it is particularly appropriate for Google, since Google puts a great deal of weight on links. Bing and Yahoo seem to value them slightly less and of course their share of search is also very much less.

Many A Mickle Does Not Make A Muckle

The old Scottish saying would confirm that if you add sufficient small things, it can add up to something substantial. However it may well be with the Google search algorithms the down-weighting of spam-type links is so severe that there is no SEO benefit by creating them. There are a wide variety of spam-type links including illogical reciprocal links and links from dubious websites. In the worst case such links might even lead to penalties, if the website is deemed to have breached the Google Quality Guidelines. As Baker points out even links that appear on a site-wide basis in sidebars or footers may well be also very much devalued.

Creating Link Value

A much surer approach is to create content on the website that is of interest to other humans, thus attracting unsolicited links from admirers. It is useful to have a diversity of online content. Baker has some most useful information on building out diverse links in a Link Building Evaluation Guide.

The role of blogs in all this should be emphasized. The blog structure naturally creates a number of associated web pages for any single blog post. All of these support extra internal links. Although less valuable than independent external links, they do add real link value. At the same time, the RSS news feed pings the search engines and ensures that the blog is on their (robot) radar screen. Writing well constructed blog posts is perhaps the surest way of expending effort to get more search engine visibility.

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